Friday, March 5, 2010

Elites and World Future: The Club of Rome

There is little doubt that the Club of Rome is an organization of elites. The original founders included Fiat executive, Aurelio Peccei. whose 1965 speech to a group of international Bankers, who were meeting to consider measures to help Latin American economies. Peccei's speech caught the attention of a number of people who could be characterized as possessing elite status, including American secretary of State Dean Rusk. Jermen Gvishiani, Soviet leader Alexey Kosygin's son-in-law and vice-chairman of the State Committee on Science and Technology of the Soviet Union, and Alexander King, by then Director General for Scientific Affairs for the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. The Club of Rome movement quickly attracted many individuals about whom worlds like distinguished, famous, wealthy and powerful applied: An early Club of Rome Executive Committee included:

Belisario Betancur ex-President of Colombia

Umberto Colombo ex Minister of Research and Universities of Italy

Orio Giarini Secretary General of the Geneva Association

Bohdan Hawrylyshyn Chairman,Council of Advisers of the Parliament of Ukraine

Alexander King co-founder of the Club of Rome

Yotaro Kobayashi President of Fuji Xerox

Eberhard von Koerber President of ABB Europe

Ruud Lubbers ex-Prime Minister of the Netherlands

Manfred Max-Neef Rector, Universidad Australe de Chile

Samuel Nana Sinkam FAO Director for Congo

Ilya Prigogine Nobel Laureate

Right from the start participants in the Club of Rome viewed themselves as epistemologically privileged. There was an assumption to knowledge that greatly exceeded the groups intellectual capital. This claim to knowledge clearly appears in the group's charter document, "The Predicament of Mankind".

That statement begins:

As in every epoch of its existence, mankind today finds itself in a particular "situation".

Of course, but as a statement of fact, this is both pompous and trivial. The statement added

In some deep sense our situation compels us to animate and perpetuate it almost blindly, and thus to move toward a future whose shape or quality we do not comprehend, whose surprises we have not succeeded in reducing to a rational frame of ideas, whose complexities we are not in the least sure of being able to control.

This is of course nothing that the Philosopher Hegel had not already said one hundred and fifty years before, but Hegel would have added, people are not going to figure out what their situation is until after they are out of it. Hegel lived in a period when the limitations of knowledge was an important intellectual issue. The founders of the Club of Rome were not nearly as circumspect. they stated,

In some deep sense our situation compels us to animate and perpetuate it almost blindly, and thus to move toward a future whose shape or quality we do not comprehend, whose surprises we have not succeeded in reducing to a rational frame of ideas, whose complexities we are not in the least sure of being able to control.

Here we have a complaint about Hegel's dilemma, but not Hegel's acknowledgement that a way of life has to be dying before it can be understood or controlled.

The statement tells us,

There are, however, a few basic perceptions that possess both wide currency and increasing persuasiveness, by means of which people in many different walks of life have begun to apprehend the nature of this situation. It is thanks to such perceptions that we have come to recognize the forces that hold us in their grip as arising from what we have long recognized as being the very source of our power and achievement --at least in those countries where the industrial mode of life has flourished and broken the back of age-old scarcities.

The source of our power lies in the extraordinary techno- logical capital we have succeeded in accumulating and in propagating, and the all-pervasive analytic or positivistic methodologies which by shaping our minds as well as our sensibilities, have enabled us to do what we have done.

In other words, we have gotten where we are by science and rationality, but

our achievement has, in some unforeseen (perhaps unforseeable) manner, failed to satisfy those other requirements that would have permitted us to evolve in ways that, for want of a better word, we shall henceforth call "balanced." It has failed to provide us with an ethos, a morality, ideals, institutions, a vision of man and of mankind and a politics which are in consonance with the way of life that has evolved as the expression of our success. Worse, it has failed to give us a global view from which we could begin to conceive the ethos, morality, ideals, institutions, and policies requisite to an inter-dependent world --this, despite the fact that the dynamics of our technologies and of our positivistic outlooks are global in their impacts, their consequences, their endless profusion and, more importantly, in the promises they proclaim and in the promises they imply.

Well so the statement is that we are far from perfect. Well of course, but here we slip into danger. And we see exactly what that danger is going to be,

It is the aim of this particular project of the Club of Rome to turn the above assumption into a positive statement, by trying to cognize and investigate the all-pervasive problematique which is built into our situation, through some new leap of inventiveness.

At this point we see the emergence of the Club of Rome's epistemologically privileged. The Club of Rome limited itself to 100 members at first, but while it had grand pretentions it did not have a real intellectual orientation until Jay Forrester entered the picture. Forrester was a pioneer in the system dynamics research, and had at a younger age engineered feed back mechanisms. The idea of systems was not exactly new in science, and in fact scientists were already involved in system and feedback research, including carbon cycle research. Perhaps someone who was wiser than Forrester would have known better than to attempt to undertake a modeling of the dynamics of human society, but after applying system dymanics to the life of industries and cities, Forrester decided that he was ready to take on the world.

We know a good deal more about systems and modeling now than we did in 1970's. By that time Forrester was a big name, and an MIT professor, but he was about to over reach himself. As Paul Klugman later pointed out,

The essential story there was one of hard-science arrogance: Forrester, an eminent professor of engineering, decided to try his hand at economics, and basically said, “I’m going to do economics with equations! And run them on a computer! I’m sure those stupid economists have never thought of that!” And he didn’t walk over to the east side of campus to ask whether, in fact, any economists ever had thought of that, and what they had learned. (Economists tend to do the same thing to sociologists and political scientists. The general rule to remember is that if some discipline seems less developed than your own, it’s probably not because the researchers aren’t as smart as you are, it’s because the subject is harder.)

As a result, the study was a classic case of garbage-in-garbage-out: Forrester didn’t know anything about the empirical evidence on economic growth or the history of past modeling efforts, and it showed. The insistence of his acolytes that the work must be scientific, because it came out of a computer, only made things worse.

Forrester's model was in fact focused on problems that were on the popular agenda in 1970. As it happened I was involved in an attempt to develop a computerized environmental model in 1970-71 so I had some down and dirty insights into the problems of modeling. When I finally got a copy of World Dynamics, I immediately spotted some big flaws. First the world was not treated as a multi-dimensional entity. The only dimension the Forrester model recognized was time. Thus transportation played no role in the Forrester model. The Forrester model focused on four variables which the black box of Forrester's equations related. Those variables were:

It is certain that resource shortage, pollution, crowding, disease, food failure, war, or some other equally powerful force will limit population and industrialization if persuasion and psychological factors do not. Exponential growth cannot continue forever.

Those topics were all in the air in 1970, and this makes World Dynamics interesting from the viewpoint of the spirit of the time. The problem is, however that Forrester has little insight into the dynamics of his variables. If you ask demographers, they would scoff at the notion that population dynamics can be explained without refercnce to where people live. This allowed Forrester to ignore population trends in the advanced industrial and post industrial economies, and the implication of those trends in a global economy.

Forrester's was also guilty of ignoring pollution trends. Already in 1970 pollution problems in industrialized countries were subject to increasing regulation. Of the major pollutants only CO2 was not subject to pollution regulations, and Forrester and indeed the movement he spawned largely ignored CO2. This was most unfortunate, because the Forrester/Club of Rome movement largely ignored the CO2 problem for a long time.

Forrester appears to have based his resource depletion model on M. King Hubbard's study of oil depletion. Forrester failed to note that in the same paper in which Hubbard announced his oil depletion findings, he also analyzed uranium reserves and found,

From these evidences it appears that there exist within minable depths in the United States rocks with uranium contents equivalent to 1000 barrels or more of oil per metric ton, whose total energy content is probably several hundred times that of all the fossil fuels combined. The same appears to be true of many other parts of the world. Consequently, the world appears to be on the threshold of an era which in terms of energy consumption will be at least an order of magnitude greater than that made possible by the fossil fuels.

It should be noted that rock with uranium recovery potential of equivalent of 1000 barrels of oil per ton by no means represented the downward limit of uranium ore recovery with favorable energy returns. Further, Hubbard failed to note the further availability of even larger quantise of thorium, which was also recoverable with favorable rates of energy return.

The availability of such large amounts of recoverable energy resources the future resource picture might well be effected. For example mining of low concentration mineral resources such as shale rock or granite for uranium and thorium would probably yield large amounts of mineral and metal byproducts. These byproducts could be recovered with little added energy costs. Wast heat from nuclear reactors could be used to desalinate sea water, and valuable mineral resources extracted from the rejected brine. Finally, the so called waste from a large scale nuclear energy economy could be "mined" for stable and valuable fission products. In addition to these nuclear economy based resources, other minerals and metals exist in basically inexhaustible supply in the earths crust, Forrester simply assumed that all resource supplies were similar to oil, when in fact they are not. When one resource becomes scarce, another may be substituted in its place. Substitution thus becomes a major factor for sustaining civilization, but there is no evidence that Forrester recognized the importance of substitution in maintaining a long term economy. Thus Forrester's account of resource sustainability was extremely flawed.

Unfortunately, Forrester's extremely flawed non spacial World Dynamics model caught the attention of the Club of Rome, and became the Club of Rome model. Peccei managed to obtain Volkswagen Foundation money for further research on Forrester's World Dynamics model by a Forrester associate at MIT, Dennis Meadows. The result was the famous study The Limits of Growth. Not only did the limits of growth fail to correct Forrester's flaws, it projected a Neo-Malthuesian future of a resource starved civilization. In doing so, Meadows and his associates over looked the true nature of the earths' material resources. Further, it appears likely that in preference to mining ever larger stocks of minerals, future human economies will take more and more to recycling as a basic source of resources. A further source of economic growth would be more efficient use of existing resources, for example through miniaturization Through recovery of resources through the operation of a nuclear economy, the recycling of resources, more efficient use of resources, and resource substitution a high material lifestyle would be available for the entire world's population. Further through increased efficiency, the world's economy could continue to grow as long as technological advances continued. Finally more efficient use of resources and shifting to low pollution technologies would control pollution problems. Finally with economic development, world population would peak and then gradually decline. This population decline would not be caused by poverty and scarcity, but by demographic factors linked to improved quality of life already present in materially advanced nations. The tong term decline in population would lead to a gradually increasing level of per capita wealth, and with greater wealth would come improved quality of life.

Thus we have seen that a largely self appointed organization of world elites, The Club of Rome, assigned to itself and to its agents a special capacity for knowledge. In addition to Jay Forrester's World Dynamics findings, one other aspect of Forrester's work probably drew the Club of Rome's attention, that is Forrester's contention that systems dynamic computer modeling lead to counterintuitive conclusions. Forrester never appears to have considered that some of his conclusions might have been counter intuitive because they were wrong. Forrester's system dynamic world model was what Bruno Larour called a black box. This black box has become a corner stone of the Club of Rome's claims to special knowledge.

We are now confronted with a paradox. The Club of Rome was founded as a consequence of a speech given in a meeting of international bankers intended to to aid in the economic development of Latin America. The Club of Rome however, quickly adopts a position that says in effect, developmental efforts directed toward Latin America are doomed to lead to disastrous consequence and mass death. We should rightly ask, "what is going on here?"

5 comments:

I especially enjoy economists that with a straight face refer to the GDP of the soviet union as if it were a meaningful concept. (summing the arbitrary prices payed by the soviet planning comittee over the arbitrary goods they have ordered the economy to produce gives a great big number; but what does this number even mean?)

The idea that you can aggregate mercury pollution, NoX, SoX, particulates, pesticide residues, superfund sites and all other kinds of pollution into a single number and have it be meaningful is insane enough. The idea that someone who knows nothing about the dynamics that generate the various kinds of pollution could write a simple computer model that could forecast their behaviour into the far future is beyond mere garden variety narcissism.

The Club of Rome is made up of fundamentally stupid people. One of the key components of stupidity is an adherence to a strict belief system that leads to an inability to cope with new information or systems. Far from being the visionaries they style themselves to be, they are little more than intellectually bankrupt, petty conservatives, projecting their fears that they might lose the privileged status that most of them acquired through the accident of birth.

It is only because their utterances hit a nerve with others of their class that they are accorded any status as a 'think tank.' The Club of Rome's real service is putting into words what most of the world's self-anointed aristocracy is thinking, without having to pay a political price for doing so.

Forrester concluded: It is certain that resource shortage, pollution, crowding, disease, food failure, war, or some other equally powerful force will limit population and industrialization if persuasion and psychological factors do not. Exponential growth cannot continue forever.

I don't know of anyone, even among the "cornucopians", who is calling for unlimited exponential growth.

It is interesting to note that the factors explicitly named by Forrester that might limit population growth and industrialization are all negative! I take persuasion and psychological factors as neutral.

If we look at Europe and the United States (if immigration is subtracted out), we have examples of how positive factors like prosperity and education reverse population growth. As Charles Barton wrote:

Finally with economic development, world population would peak and then gradually decline. This population decline would not be caused by poverty and scarcity, but by demographic factors linked to improved quality of life already present in materially advanced nations. The long term decline in population would lead to a gradually increasing level of per capita wealth, and with greater wealth would come improved quality of life.

Since it seems that improved quality of life leads to lower birth rates, the development of lesser developed world must take place first. Any further improvements in the quality of life that might derive from a decline in population follow afterwards.

Forrester's ignorance of biology is apparent also, all other lifeforms on Earth also have the ability to grow exponentially, yet in practice this only happens when a niche opens up. Feedback mechanisms exist that limit population growth when the environment doesn't provide the resources for it, and Forrester is totally ignorant of this.

Another fundamental assumption in the analysis is that we are forever constrained to the resources limited to the surface region of Earth. The possibility of tapping resources in NEOs or the moon is simply never considered.

Charles, the title is missing an L in club... Interesting information, thanks for posting.

We can find more information on the club of Rome "real" purpose by a quick search here:http://bit.ly/a0G37pand here:http://bit.ly/aqp90g

Personally I don't believe in limits to anything, surely there are physical limits to any system, but the human creative power as always pushed those limits forward by leaps and bounds. Compare humanity that had only wood fire as an energy source to now with fission and soon fusion that CAN provide limitless energy to humanity and with limitless energy, you can do almost anything human creativity can come up with.

I would not pay too much attention to those so called "Elites" of the world. I consider any human being with the potential to understand the physical world and the physical economy the new Elite that will propelled humanity in a bright future.